by Marie Joseph
‘My heart grieves for that poor dead girl and her family, but I have never met any of them, so I can’t tell you anything, Mrs Wilkinson,’ she had said. ‘Our only connection is in that she worked in the weaving shed, and that Dorothy has been walking home from school with her brother.’
‘And that hardly makes us relatives,’ she’d added under her breath.
Even Gerald had rung and tried to wriggle out of taking Margaret to the Police Ball that night. She’d heard only one side of the conversation of course, but she could tell that Margaret had been quite put out about it. And quite rightly when they’d had the tickets for weeks. Phyllis was reduced to playing patience, a ploy she always used when under stress, just as some women scrubbed floors or others went out and bought themselves a new hat. She laid a black jack over a red queen.
The last straw had been when Ethel called round and asked if she would be going to the funeral.
‘As a token of respect merely,’ she’d added quickly, seeing the look on her sister’s face. ‘On account of the girl working for Matthew, and with Dorothy being her brother’s little friend.’
And now Dorothy was refusing to answer what was surely a perfectly straightforward question. Phyllis repeated it: ‘Where was Stanley ringing from, dear? I don’t suppose anyone in Inkerman Street is on the telephone, are they?’
Her younger daughter came and drooped in the doorway, her face pale, and her blue eyes shadowed as if she hadn’t slept for a week.
‘No, Mother, they use tom-toms to communicate with each other down that end of the town,’ she said. Then as if she knew she had gone too far she went on: ‘Stanley was ringing me from a house at the top end of the street. The man living there is a Trade Union Secretary, and in cases of emergency he lets the neighbours pay to use his telephone. He’s a kind man apparently. Stanley says he even went out of his own living-room so that he could be private.’ She hesitated for a moment, then sighed. ‘Ruby was going to have a baby.’
Phyllis’s small face seemed to set itself neatly into lines of smug satisfaction. She tapped with the edge of a playing card on the polished table.
‘There you are, then. I’m not surprised, not in the least.’
‘Stanley and his mother were very surprised,’ Dorothy said quietly.
Phyllis turned up an ace and laid it down in triumph. ‘Well, of course they would be. A mother is always the last person to believe that sort of thing of her own daughter, not that she wouldn’t have stood by her, I’m quite sure she would. But at least it gives the police more to work on.’ She frowned at the eight of spades.
‘What do you mean by that, Mother?’
‘Well, now the police know the kind of girl she was, they will know the kind of man to look for.’ She shuffled the cards together in exasperation. ‘I knew it wasn’t going to come out. Yes, he was probably one of many, and when the girl told him that she was going to say he was the father of her child, he lost his temper and killed her. It won’t be the first murder to happen that way, and it won’t be the last. Especially if he happened to be a married man. Oh yes, it puts a different complexion on the whole thing now. Dorothy! Where are you going? Must you always walk away when I try to talk to you?’
Dorothy was walking slowly upstairs, wondering vaguely if she was in any way psychic. Or just plain fanciful? Watching her mother’s small mouth as she talked, the playing cards held neatly in her well-manicured hands, she had felt again that strange sense of evil, of impending horror. In her own house, the house she had been born in, solid, red-bricked, its dark mahogany furniture gleaming from Mrs Wilkinson’s ministrations. Something terrible was going to happen, she knew it. The knowledge of it was a crawling in her scalp, a feeling in her very bones. She stood on the landing, quite still, rubbing the tops of her arms as if she felt a sudden draught.
She could still hear the heartbreak in Stanley’s voice when he spoke to her, using the clipped exaggerated emphasis of words as people did when they were unaccustomed to using a telephone.
‘Ruby wasn’t promiscuous. She was a very reserved, private sort of girl . . . you know?’
‘You don’t have to be promiscuous to start a baby.’ Whispering in the hope that her mother wouldn’t be able to hear. ‘It must have been someone she thought she was in love with. Someone she was in love with, I mean.’
‘I agree, but it’s shaken my mother up. She feels it must have been all her fault somehow. Her not guessing and everything, then Ruby not wanting to tell her. She wouldn’t have been turned out of the house or anything. My mother has strong principles but she’s not a hard person. She would have understood and tried to help.’
‘Of course she would.’
They had never talked on the telephone before, and there was an awkward breathing silence between them, the shyness that came down like a barrier at times, made worse by the proximity of others.
‘I’d best be going then, Dorothy.’
She had lowered her voice, her glance going towards the sitting-room door, open a fraction, imagining her mother with the pack of playing cards in her hand, the neat head on one side in a listening attitude.
‘Will I be seeing you after school next week?’
Stanley coughed, forgetting he was holding the receiver, and she jumped. ‘I’m not going back till after the funeral . . . I have a lot of things to sort out in my mind. About Oxford. I may have to get a job, as a clerk, anything. I want to talk to you, but it isn’t easy at the moment . . .’
‘Is it very awful, love?’
‘If I wasn’t there to tell her to come to the table, to go to bed, and to get up, I think she would just sit there without moving. Mrs Crawley says it’s the shock. The minister’s been from the chapel, but he said all the wrong things . . .’
Dorothy started to go into her own room, then changed her mind. She didn’t feel like being alone, and Margaret was there next door getting ready for the Police Ball. She would listen. She would tell her that Stanley couldn’t give up his chance of going to university, not after winning a state scholarship. Against overwhelming odds he’d won his right to go. . . .
‘Is that you, Dorothy?’
Margaret sounded gay and happy. ‘Come in and talk to me, I’m almost ready.’
And as usual Margaret was bewailing the fact that she looked a positive mess whilst looking as pretty as a picture on the lid of a box of chocolates. Dorothy could see it . . . a garlanded swing with Margaret laughing at a blue sky with her pink and blue net skirts billowing round her. She was busily applying vaseline to her eyelids, rubbing it in with the tip of her little finger, then closing her eyes and squinting in the mirror from underneath lowered eyelashes to get the effect. She spoke without turning round, carefully, so as not to disturb the petunia-shaded lipstick on her wide mouth.
‘For a minute I thought when the phone rang that it might be Gerald. He didn’t want to go to the dance tonight for some reason, but I did what Mother does when she persuades Father into changing his mind . . .’ Margaret smeared the vaseline over the top of her lipstick. ‘I told him it didn’t matter in the least; that I couldn’t care less whether we went or not, and he was so taken aback it ended with him persuading me to go!’ She peered anxiously down the front of her dress. ‘You don’t think this dress is a wee bit low in front, do you? I’d pin my pearl brooch across it, if I could find it. I’ve looked in my jewel-case and it’s not there.’
Dorothy walked across to the wardrobe. ‘The last time you wore it you had it pinned to the neckline of your green and brown dress.’ She produced the dress with a flourish. ‘There you are! You must have forgotten to take it off when you put the dress away.’
Tongue protruding slightly, Margaret pinned the brooch at the middle point of the sweetheart neckline of her dress. She pouted. ‘It’s a bit scratchy, but nothing shows, that’s the main thing.’
She looked so seriously worried that Dorothy, in spite of her mood of depression, laughed out loud. ‘Doesn’t Gerald know that you’ve got
bosoms, then?’
Margaret answered her quite literally, unaware as usual that she was being teased. ‘Well, of course he does, silly. We are engaged, remember. No, it’s not that, it’s just that he can’t bear other men staring at me.’
Dorothy fidgeted round the room, picking up the small gilt clock from the bedside table, holding it to her ear, then putting it down again, picking up the white fur jacket from the bed and holding it to her cheek for a moment. ‘Is he very passionate, your Gerald?’
Margaret wasn’t offended. At eighteen Dorothy was bound to be becoming curious about such things. She felt quite matronly as she answered her. ‘He’s had a past, of course,’ she confided with more than a touch of pride. ‘One couldn’t expect anything else with him being a man of the world and living on his own in London for so long. But he respects me.’ She patted the brooch with a satisfied hand. ‘Mother says it’s far better for a bride if the man is experienced when they get married.’
Dorothy dabbed behind her ears with Margaret’s scent, a woody perfume she decided she didn’t much care for. ‘But wrong for the girl to be?’
‘Well, of course, Dorothy. No man wants shop-soiled goods now, does he?’
Dorothy started to answer. Actually opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again. How can we be sisters? she asked herself, silently and dramatically, searching the ceiling as if looking for the answer. Sisters, flesh of the same flesh, blood of the same blood, brought up together in the same house, of the same environment exactly? How can we be so close when we think so differently? She felt suddenly very, very old; at least twice as old as Margaret, and ten times as wise. Rather wistfully she unfolded a pink chiffon hankie lying on the dressing-table and sniffed the pink powder-puff nestling inside, leaving a smear of rose rachel powder on the tip of her nose.
‘I only wish Gerald could find his cuff-links as easily as you found my brooch,’ she heard Margaret saying.
Dorothy saw the reflection of her eyes widening in surprise in the mirror. She had been with Margaret to choose the cuff-links as an engagement present for Gerald, and the memory of the time it had taken to decide on a suitable gift was still sharp in her memory. For over half an hour she had stood at the counter of Adamson’s, the jewellers in King Edward Street, hopping from one foot to the other with impatience as Mr Adamson himself had spread the counter with a piece of black velvet, laying out tie-pins, wristlet watches and cuff-links in a shining display. Margaret’s final choice had been the cuff-links because they were shaped like flattened hearts.
‘Symbolic,’ Margaret had sighed.
‘Most unusual,’ Mr Adamson had said, winking slyly at Dorothy.
‘But how could he have lost them?’ she said sharply, then she saw Margaret’s face flush with loyalty.
‘People do lose things, you know, Dorothy, and Gerald’s terribly upset about it. In fact, he made me promise not to tell anyone he’d lost them. They’re sure to turn up, he says, so for heaven’s sake don’t tell Mother, or you can imagine . . .’ Her voice tailed off in mid-sentence as the unmistakable sound of Gerald’s car was heard in the drive outside.
‘He’s here!’ she cried, and Dorothy thought she looked as if a candle had been lit inside her head, so that her mouth and eyes radiated light. Like a turnip on Hallowe’en night, she thought, not very poetically.
But even she had to admit that they made a beautiful couple as they left for the dance, and whilst Phyllis twittered round Gerald, pressing him to a sherry to ‘put them in the right mood for a lovely evening together’ she intercepted the look he gave his fiancée as surreptitiously he raised one arm slightly to show her that the cuff-links were safely restored to their rightful place in the starched turn-back cuffs of his dress shirt.
‘I could have sworn they were smaller than that,’ Dorothy muttered to herself as she stood with her mother and waved them off from the door.
‘What did you say, dear?’ Phyllis asked.
‘Oh, nothing,’ Dorothy said. ‘Just thinking aloud, that’s all.’
‘I think I’ll go mad and have another sherry,’ Phyllis said, with the air of one who felt that she deserved some kind of solace.
Ten
‘I CAN’T EXPECT Mrs Crawley to go to the market for me; she’s doing far more than enough already, and I’ve never been one for putting on kindness,’ Ada Armstrong said. ‘But what she pays for her greengrocery at the new shop down on the bottom doesn’t bear thinking about. Mr Crawley’s in work of course, so she doesn’t have to count her pennies like we do.’ She pushed at her hair until it stood up straight away from her forehead as if she’d been startled by a headless ghost. ‘No, I can’t expect her to go down the market late this afternoon when they’re selling some things off cheap, and it wouldn’t do for me to be seen out till after the funeral – wouldn’t be decent.’
Stanley closed his eyes, sending up a silent prayer that at last his mother was showing what the doctor would have called an interest. ‘I’ll go down if you like, Mum.’
‘Life must go on,’ the minister from the chapel had said, and he supposed that an interest in cut oranges and bruised tomatoes could be interpreted as a beginning. Besides, the claustrophobic atmosphere of the tiny living-room with its banked-up fire, its steaming clothes and continual coming and going of neighbours with offerings of seed-cakes and batches of soda scones was beginning to get on his nerves. He knew he was being selfish and that his place was by his mother’s side, but he wanted to feel the wind on his face, wanted to run and run until his heart pounded in his ears, wanted to see Dorothy and talk to her about his decision to leave school and forego his place at university – wanted to forget, just for a little while, what had happened.
Once or twice, whilst Mrs Crawley talked with his mother, helping to fold the washing brought in from the backyard, he had escaped upstairs to his bedroom, and sitting down at the card-table by the window had opened a book, had even taken his pen and dipped it into the bottle of blue-black ink, putting himself out of reach of Mrs Crawley’s darting tongue and the closed-in misery of his mother’s face.
Through the net curtains he could see the walled-in backyards of the houses opposite in Balaclava Street, drenched in brilliant sunshine, the tin baths hanging on the walls, the coal-sheds and the outside lavatories — even sometimes a glimpse of their white-washed interiors. One particularly sunny afternoon a woman had appeared from her back door carrying a battered deck-chair, and there, just as if she were setting it up on the sand facing the sea at Blackpool in wakes week, she had positioned it next to the dustbin. Then lying back in it she had lifted her skirt to expose fat white thighs, and closed her eyes. A sleek grey cat had joined her, curling itself up on the flagstones, and after a while the woman had unbuttoned her blouse, turning the revers in so that the top curves of her enormous breasts were revealed, offering herself to the sun like a sacrifice.
He had watched her fascinated and repelled at one and the same time, staring until his eyes ached at the corners, then jerking himself back to reality as he heard footsteps on the stairs and the sound of Mrs Crawley’s voice coming through the thin plywood his father had erected to separate the two rooms.
‘I’m being honest, Mrs Armstrong, I’m your friend and I wouldn’t let you go to your own daughter’s funeral looking a sight now, would I? And navy blue’s every bit as respectable as black. Go on, try your ‘at on. No, not like that, Pull if forward a bit. Sailors went out two years ago. That’s better. It only needs dusting off a bit, that fur-felt catches every speck, and I’ll tell you what, love, I’ll lend you me bit of fox to put round your neck. I’ve never been up ’cemetery yet but what it wasn’t blowing fit to freeze your bits and pieces.’
Then his mother’s murmur, so low that it was impossible to catch what she was saying. Stanley strained to catch the words without being in the least interested, then stared through the window again.
The sun had gone in and the woman sunbathing folded her deck-chair and carried it inside the ho
use, followed by the cat with its tail erect. A lowering cloud appeared to be so thick that he felt if pressed it would drip apple juice, like the muslin bag his mother sometimes suspended over the big blue bowl in the kitchen when she made apple jelly. His head felt as if someone were adding little sums up in it, pressing with the point of a pencil on every single figure. The thought of life going on, just as the minister had predicted it would, in that house, with the door of Ruby’s room closed, her narrow bed stripped of its covers, the wire behind its cretonne curtain bare of her dresses, filled him with a terrible, blank despair. He dipped the pen in the blue-black ink and tried to write a poem about the awfulness of everything. Wrote three lines then tore it up and dropped the pieces into the empty biscuit tin he used as a waste bin.
‘You just write me a list of what you want me to get, and I’ll go down the market,’ he told his mother. ‘I won’t take the basket, I’ll fold a carrier-bag and carry it underneath my arm,’ he said, and was touched almost to the point of tears to see how what could have passed for a smile crossed her face.
‘Your dad will never be dead as long as you’re alive, Stanley,’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t carry a basket neither, not for love nor money he wouldn’t. I remember once he brought me a bunch of violets home on a Saturday when he’d been to watch the Rovers, and he stuffed them into his mac pocket rather than carry them through the street.’ She licked the point of her pencil and thought for a moment. ‘It didn’t do them no good neither, but I put them in water with an aspirin and they come up just as good as new.’ She sighed. ‘It’s no good. I can’t get my mind on food. It doesn’t seem right that we have to eat somehow. I’ll give you three shillings and you can get just what you think fit, There’ll be cut oranges and bruised tomatoes if you go now . . . oh love, it’s all wrong that we should be feeling hungry or bothering about anything when Ruby’s . . . when she’s not coming through that door no more. I still can’t believe it somehow.’